My Stardew Valley addiction has subsided since then, but even just thinking about it now makes me want to jump right back in. I hate doing yardwork only slightly less than housecleaning, but my love of the video game alternative is vastly disproportionate, as I described in exhausting detail last year.

Why oh why doesn’t the real world have save states?!Īnyway, if someone ever does make a good house-flipping game, I would play the crap out of it – if I could first wrestle the game controller away from my wife, that is. Maybe because it doesn’t involve multiple trips to Home Depot in the same damn day, or accidents that lead to other unrelated DIY projects – like the time I was cleaning out the refrigerator and managed to shatter one of the glass shelves into a billion tiny pieces. But the idea of fixing up and redecorating virtual homes is surprisingly appealing to me.

And unlike my wife’s HGTV obsession, I can’t even pretend that the virtual remodeling is educational – you clean toilets in the game by vaguely waving a push broom at them! You’ll never catch Joanna Gaines doing that – though Chip probably would, the big dumb idiot…Īnyway, House Flipper actually all that fun, so I only enjoy playing it slightly more than I do real housecleaning. I already mentioned it a paragraph ago (seriously, are you even reading this or just looking at the pictures?), but House Flipper is the ultimate example of something I’d rather play in a video game than live through in real life.

Video games better than real life